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Saturday, 21 September 2013

The Ghost that spoke Gaelic

'An Incident at the Battle of Culloden' by David Morier, oil on canvas.

Scotland, 1749, just four years after the failed Jacobite rising and the
defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans at the Battle of Culloden.
Reprisals had been severe; the wearing of kilt and tartan was
forbidden; the rising was still fresh and sore in everyone’s minds and
by no means necessarily still over. Messages (and money) flew between
the Prince in exile and his loyal supporter Cluny MacPherson, in hiding
on Ben Alder.

Into this volatile, still smouldering arena marched, in summer of 1749,
the newly married – and, it has to be said, utterly and complacently
naïve – Sergeant Arthur Davies of ‘Guise’s Regiment’, in charge of a
patrol of eight private soldiers, heading over the mountains from
Aberdeen to Dunrach in Braemar, for no more interesting purpose than to
keep a general eye on the countryside.

This kind of countryside...

Sergeant Davies was a fine figure of a man, but not at all sensibly
dressed considering what he was about. He carried on him a green silk
purse containing fifteen and a half guineas which he had saved; he wore a
silver watch and two gold rings. There were silver buckles on his
brogues, two dozen silver buttons on his striped ‘lute string’
waistcoat; he had a silk ribbon to tie his hair, and a silver-laced hat.
Thus attired he said goodbye to his wife, who never saw him again, and
set off – encountering on the way one John Growar, in Glenclunie, whom
he told off for carrying a tartan coat. And shortly after this, the
over-confident Sergeant left his men and went off over the hill - alone -
to try and shoot a stag.

And ‘vanished as if the fairies had taken him’. His men and his captain
searched for four days, while rumours ran wild about the countryside
that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain
Macdonald. But no body was found…

Until, in June 1750, a shepherd called Alexander MacPherson came to
visit Donald Farquharson, the son of the man with whom Sergeant Davies
had been lodging before his death. MacPherson, who was living in a
shepherd’s hut or shieling up on the hills, complained that he ‘was
greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies’ who had appeared to
him as a man dressed in blue and shown MacPherson where his bones lay.
The ghost had also named and denounced his murderers – in fluent Gaelic,
of which in life, Sergeant Davies had of course not spoken a word… But
Farquharson accompanied MacPherson, and the bones were duly found in a
peat-moss, about half a mile from the road the patrol had used, minus
silver buckles and articles of value. The two men buried the bones on
the spot where they lay, and kept quiet about it.

But of course, the story spread. Nevertheless it was not till three
years later, in 1753, that Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald
were arrested for the Sergeant’s murder on the testimony of his ghost.
At the trial Isobel MacHardie who had shared shepherd MacPherson’s
shieling during the summer of the ghost, swore that ‘she saw something
naked come in at the door which frighted her so much she drew the
clothes over her head. That when it appeared, it came in a bowing
posture, and that next morning she asked MacPherson what it was, and he
replied not to be afeared, it would not trouble them any more.’

Apart from the ghostly testimony, there was plenty of circumstantial
evidence to convict the murderers. Clerk’s wife had been seen wearing
Davies’ ring; after the murder Clerk had become suddenly rich. And a
number of the Camerons later claimed to have witnessed the murder
itself, at sunset, from a hollow on top of the hill: they never
volunteered an explanation of what they themselves had been doing up
there – doubtless engaged in the illicit business of smuggling gold from
Cluny to the Prince.

Things looked black for the accused murderers. Yet a jury of Edinburgh
tradesmen, moved by the sarcastic jokes of the defence, acquitted the
prisoners. They could not take the ghost story seriously - not
necessarily because it was a ghost: though scepticism was on the
rise, ordinary people were still superstitious: the last Scottish
prosecution for witchcraft had been only in 1727. But they could not
believe in a ghost which had managed to learn Gaelic.

Andrew Lang, in whose ‘Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ I came across this
tale, adds a postscript sent to him by a friend: the words of an old
lady, ‘a native of Braemar’, who ‘left the district when about twenty
years old and who has never been back’. Lang’s friend had asked her
whether she had ever heard anything about the Sergeant’s murder, and
when she denied it, he told her the story as it was known to him. When
he had finished she broke out:

“That isn’t the way of it at all, for… a forebear of my own saw it.
He had gone out to try and get a stag, and had his gun and a deerhound
with him. He saw the men on the hill doing something, and thinking they
had got a deer, he went towards them. When he got near them, the hound
began to run on in front of him, and at that minute he saw what it was they had.
He called to the dog, and turned to run away, but saw at once he had
made a mistake, for he had called their attention to himself, and a shot
was fired after him, which wounded the dog. He then ran home as fast
as he could…”

But at this point, the old lady ‘became conscious she was telling the story,’ and clammed up. No more could be got out of her.

What a skein of tangled loyalties and hatreds, of secret
goings-on in the heather, of rebellion and politics, of a murder where
the whole countryside knew straight away who’d done it, but wouldn’t -
or dared not - say; of a ghost’s evidence, and of poor, foolish Sergeant
Davies in the middle of the Highlands, four years after the ’45,
behaving as though it was an adventure playground through which he could
strut in his finery and shoot at stags... What a lesson for more recent
times too, in places where foreign troops attempt to patrol wartorn
countrysides riven by conflicting loyalties and fears.

And how ironic that the very ghost story which brought the murder to
light – almost certainly devised by Alexander MacPherson in order to
denounce the murderers without bringing unwelcome attention upon himself
– seemed so incredible to a Lowlands jury that they would not convict.

Love it, Kath! Sergeant Davies seemed very wealthy for a sergeant. He didn't deserve to be murdered, but honestly, what a fool!That's a chilling line from the old lady's tale - 'he saw what they had...'

I loved this! And yes: 'he saw what they had' is really chilling. I also wish it had been a real ghost. Why shouldn't it speak Gaelic, actually? Presumably, in the Other World, all languages would be known to him, so he would speak the ones his interlocutors (love that word) would understand.

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